Little Girl Lost jb-1 Read online

  There was an answering machine on the table, showing one message on its digital readout. I pressed the Play button and heard a woman’s voice. It took me a second to realize whose it was.

  “Hey, beautiful,” Miranda said. “It was really good seeing you again. I know it was strange for you. For me, too. But I’d like to do it again, okay? Maybe we could watch the fireworks tomorrow. We should be able to see them from where I’m working. Maybe we can get some dinner first, before I have to go on. Give me a call, okay? Or I’ll call you, if you don’t.” Pause. “I love you, you know.” The machine clicked. A mechanical voice said, “Received Friday, December 30, at seven thirty-four p.m.”

  She sounded so eager, so happy. Why? Why had Miranda been so trusting, so willing to take Jocelyn’s overtures at face value, so quick to forgive? I pictured Jocelyn getting this message and laughing, unable to believe her good luck. We should be able to see them from where I’m working. She hadn’t even had to come up with some excuse to lure Miranda to a secluded spot. New Year’s Eve meant fireworks on the Hudson, and sure, maybe you could see them from the roof at the Sin Factory – it was a short building, but it was far enough west that at least you’d see some of the show over the tops of other buildings. And how hard would it have been for Jocelyn to get behind Miranda while they were both watching the show, press the gun to the back of her head, and pull the trigger? For God’s sake, the fireworks would even have masked the sound of the shots. Jocelyn couldn’t have set it up better herself.

  And where was she now? Collecting the money from wherever she’d hidden it, in preparation for leaving town? Or was she finding some horrible new way to do damage? The note she’d left at my mother’s building frightened me – who knew what she might do to carry out that threat?

  With that in mind, I dialed Susan’s number on my cell phone. When she didn’t answer after four rings, I called my mother’s number.

  “Hello? Who is this?” It wasn’t Susan’s voice, it was my mother’s, and she sounded unsteady, frightened.

  I spoke as quietly as I could and kept an eye on the front door. “Mom, could you put Rachel on?”

  “John! My God, are you okay? Are you safe?”

  “Yes, I’m fine – what’s wrong?”

  “Oh, my God, I was so worried about you, when Rachel said that woman was threatening to kill you-”

  “She’s threatening all of us,” I said. “We all have to be careful. That’s why I asked Rachel to stay with you.”

  “But she called!”

  “Who called? What are you talking about?”

  “She called,” my mother said again. “Just a little while ago. She told Rachel she was going to kill you-”

  “Jocelyn called?”

  “I didn’t talk to her, Rachel did. She said it was the same woman who left the note. John, she told Rachel she had a knife to your throat and was going to kill you.”

  “Well, it wasn’t true. I’m fine. Can you just put Rachel on the phone, please?”

  “She’s not here,” my mother said. “She went to find you. She tried to call you first, but there was no answer.”

  My blood went cold. The call that had come in while I was being mugged. That had been Susan. And when I hadn’t answered “Mom, please think carefully, did Rachel say where she was going?”

  “Yes, yes, I have it here. Hold on.” I heard papers rustling. I wanted to scream. “She wrote it down. She said she was going to Corlears Hook Park, to the bandstand. She said I should call the police if I didn’t hear from her in an hour. It hasn’t been an hour yet. Should I call them?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Chapter 26

  The bandstand at Corlears Hook Park was built in the Depression and abandoned some time in the seventies. God only knows why it’s still standing. Before Stonewall, before AIDS, and before AOL chatrooms, it used to be a popular cruising spot for East Village men looking to hook up. Now it was nothing, a decrepit pile behind a chain link fence that offered some crude shelter to the homeless during a rainstorm and convenient shadows for drug dealers to hide in at noon. But the truth was you didn’t even see that many homeless or drug dealers any more – even they didn’t feel safe there.

  I climbed down the fire escape as quickly as I could without breaking my neck, then ran all out down to Houston Street. I dropped the knife in the first garbage can I passed. I couldn’t afford to have the police find it on me when they arrived. I cut across Delancey, under the Williamsburg bridge, and over to Grand Street. These were long blocks, and I was badly out of breath by the time I rounded Cherry, but I kept going. My heart wasn’t beating any more, it was exploding, twice per second, against the inside of my ribs. My throat was raw from the freezing air I was taking in and my legs were burning like I’d just climbed ten flights of stairs. But I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t slow down. I hadn’t asked my mother how long ago Susan had left – all I knew was that it hadn’t been an hour yet. But a lot can go wrong in less than an hour. I pictured Jocelyn standing behind Miranda, aiming a gun at the back of her head, pulling back gently on the trigger. A lot can go wrong in less than a second.

  The park was empty. Wire fences surrounded a pair of dirt baseball diamonds. Basketball hoops with no nets stood on either end of a concrete square. In the distance, the bandstand rose behind a screen of trees, their dead branches obscuring whatever might have been going on there. But when I passed them, there was nothing to see. The bandstand was as empty as the rest of the park. I found a hole in the fence that was supposed to block access to it, and raced up to the structure. There was a pair of bathrooms on one side, but they’d been locked tight for years. I went around to the back, where a few metal doors led to storage closets or God knows what, but they were locked, too, or anyway wedged shut. The whole thing was covered with ancient graffiti and surrounded by broken bottle glass, crushed beer cans, and the droppings of the countless birds and rats that found shelter there. There was nothing else – no sign of Susan, none of Jocelyn, nothing.

  I took out my cell phone again. It was futile, but I speed-dialed Susan’s number. Maybe she’d answer, maybe she was safe after all, maybe Jocelyn hadn’t found her yet or Susan had managed to elude her. The phone started to ring.

  And offset by a half second or so, I heard the sound of Ravel’s Bolero beeping faintly, not in my ear, but from the back of the bandstand.

  I followed the sound to one of the doors in the rear, a rusted metal door with no knob even, just a round hole where you’d expect the doorknob to be. From behind it, muffled but distinct, came the sound of Susan’s cell phone. Then the beeping stopped, and in my ear I heard Susan’s voice as her voicemail picked up: “Hi, I’m not available right now-”

  I slammed the phone shut, stuck two fingers through the hole in the door, and pulled as hard as I could. It didn’t budge. “Susan,” I shouted. There was no response. “Help me get this open. Come on!” She had to be in there. Unless it was just her phone, thrown there by Jocelyn so Susan couldn’t use it, but that didn’t make any sense – why would she go to the trouble of opening one of these old doors just to get rid of a phone? I yanked harder. I planted my foot against the wall for leverage and pulled till it felt like my arms were tearing apart at the joints. The door started moving, slowly, a millimeter at a time. I pulled again, and again, and the metal groaned as the door scraped open an inch. I couldn’t see inside. But now I had leverage. I wrapped my hands around the edge of the door and dragged it open. Half a foot. A foot. Two feet.

  It was a narrow utility closet with a stripped circuit breaker box on the back wall. Susan was huddled on the ground in a heap. She wasn’t moving. I touched the side of her face. It was cold.

  I gently pulled her out of the closet and laid her on the ground. She was wearing the same sweater she’d had on the first night we’d talked at Keegan’s, only it wasn’t the color of ginger ale any more. The front was soaked through with blood.

  In the distance, I heard sirens approaching, but that
wasn’t good enough. I thumbed 911 into my phone. “Send an ambulance to Corlears Hook Park,” I said when the operator answered, “and hurry. A woman’s been hurt, badly.”

  I tried to take her pulse. I couldn’t feel it.

  The waiting area at Bellevue’s emergency room was packed. One boy with what looked like a broken arm was howling while his mother tried alternately to calm him down and get the attention of the triage nurse. But a broken arm could wait. There were head wounds, there were infectious diseases. This was one of the largest trauma centers in the world, but also one of the busiest, and there was never enough staff to go around.

  But Susan was inside. Even at Bellevue, a chest wound like hers took priority. The ambulance had arrived in less than five minutes and had torn up First Avenue with its siren blaring, dodging around cars and pedestrians to shave seconds off our arrival time. Even so, I knew it might not have been enough. They said she’d lost a lot of blood – as though that wasn’t obvious. They told me she was in critical condition. When I asked if she’d make it, they’d shrugged. EMTs had no time for politeness.

  “She’s got a chance,” one of them had said. I’d been clinging to that ever since.

  The cops had followed us to the hospital, adding their siren to the mix. They’d waited while I got her admitted, waited some more while I filled out paperwork as best I could. Last name: Feuer. First name: Susan. Home address? Home phone? Social security number? I left it all blank. Medical insurance provider? All I could do was hand over my credit card and hope I wasn’t close to my limit.

  They waited while I called Leo from a payphone and told him where I was and what had happened. They stood next to me and listened, but they waited.

  Then they were done waiting. They steered me through the triage station to an empty administrative office just past the ER. Both were uniformed cops from the Seventh Precinct. One was about my height but twice my weight, with a round face and a thick moustache and a patch on his chest that said “Conroy.” The other’s patch said “Gianakouros” and belonged to a veteran with hair the color of old curtains and deep grooves creasing his face. He was the one who had me by the arm and he took the lead in questioning me.

  “Your name?”

  “John Blake.”

  “And the victim’s name?”

  “Susan Feuer. F-E-U-E-R.”

  “What’s your relationship to the victim?”

  “She’s a friend. And we’ve been working together recently.”

  “What do you do, Mr. Blake?”

  I took out my license and showed it to him. He handed it over his shoulder to Conroy, who jotted down the license number on a spiral-bound pad. “I work for Leo Hauser. He used to be at Midtown South. He has a small agency now – just the two of us, basically.”

  “And Feuer works with you?”

  “No. She’s just been helping me with one case I’m working on. Just as a favor.”

  “Some favor,” Conroy said. He handed my license back.

  “You want to tell us what happened?” Gianakouros said.

  How to answer that? I wanted to, but this was not a story I could tell quickly. Where did it even start? When Susan began making calls for me, or before that when I first saw her dancing at the Sin Factory, or before that, when I opened the paper and saw Miranda’s face staring out at me, all innocence and accusation? Or ten years earlier, when I’d seen Miranda last, when I’d sent her off on a boomerang voyage from New York to New Mexico and back again, from possibility to disaster and from life to death? I’d have to explain an awful lot if I wanted them to understand what had happened.

  And I wouldn’t mind explaining – but right now I couldn’t afford the time. Jocelyn was still in town, but for how long? She was packed and ready to go. She’d just needed to sew up some loose ends, like the troublemaker who was calling all the strip clubs she’d ever worked at and trying to track her down. I’d set Susan on Jocelyn’s trail, and somehow it had gotten back to her. Was it any wonder that Jocelyn had decided to eliminate Susan before leaving the city?

  Now, Jocelyn probably just needed to pick up the money from wherever she’d stashed it and then she’d vanish forever. One of the country’s best agencies hadn’t been able to find her the last time she’d gone on the road, and back then she hadn’t had a half million dollars to help her hide.

  “We’re looking for a missing woman named Jocelyn Mastaduno,” I said. “Her parents haven’t heard from her in six years and they want to know what happened to her. Susan was helping me make some calls to track her down.”

  “What was she doing in the park?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How did you know she was there?”

  “Susan was staying with my mother. She told her she was going to the park, and my mother mentioned it to me.”

  “So you went there.”

  “I was worried,” I said. “I didn’t understand why she’d gone there, and the park can be dangerous at night.”

  Conroy spoke up. “Any idea who might have done this?”

  “None,” I said.

  “What about this woman you’re looking for, Mastaduno?”

  “It’s possible. I just don’t know.”

  “How close are you to finding her?”

  Pretty close, I thought – if I can get out of here. I fought to keep my voice calm. “I can’t say. We’re not the first agency to work on it. The last one took a year and never found her.”

  “Maybe you’re closer than they were.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “If Miss Feuer could tell us who she was meeting in the park, we might have something,” Gianakouros said. “But she’s not going to be doing much talking any time soon. Not with multiple stab wounds in her chest.”

  No, not soon. Maybe not ever.

  “We’re going to canvass the area for witnesses tonight, people in the neighborhood, anyone who might have seen it happen. But we’re also going to need to talk to you some more.”

  “And your mother,” Conroy said.

  “That’s right, your mother, and Mastaduno’s parents, and anyone else you can think of who might know something about this. We’re going to need any information you have.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “But can we do it in the morning? I can’t think straight now.” They looked at each other. “I’m sorry, it’s just too much. I’m a wreck.” I held my hands up. They were trembling, and it wasn’t an act. “First thing in the morning, nine a.m., I’ll be there. I promise, I’ll help any way I can. I’m just not up to it now.”

  “Eight a.m.,” Gianakouros said. “Wreck or no wreck. We need you.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Conroy’s voice softened. “You want us to ask the doctor if you can look in on her?” he said. “Maybe she’s out of surgery.”

  I shook my head. “Five stab wounds to the chest, there’s only one way she’d be out of surgery this soon. So I hope to God she isn’t.”

  Why hadn’t I told them? It would have been simple. I had Jocelyn’s address. They could have gone right now and arrested her, or if she wasn’t there, they could have staked the apartment out and waited for her to arrive. They could at least have taken the luggage cart in as evidence, gotten fingerprints and blood from it, tied Lenz’s murder to Miranda’s, gotten me off the hook in Queens, begun the process of tracking her down – something. But I hadn’t done it.

  It would have been the right thing to do – I knew that. But the time was past for doing the right thing. It had passed when Jocelyn lured Susan down to the park and sank a blade five times into her chest. The person who did that, the person who murdered an innocent woman and left her body on a strip club roof, the person who shot Wayne Lenz in cold blood and left me to take the fall, a person who could do those things didn’t deserve to be arrested and prosecuted and defended and maybe sent to jail or maybe not, depending on how sympathetic a jury she found. What she deserved, the police and the courts weren’t the ones to delive
r.

  I waited till I was well away from the hospital and confident that neither Conroy nor Gianakouros was following me. I dialed the number and waited while it rang. When the hoarse voice said “Yes?” I hesitated for a second. There would be no turning back.

  “Yes?” he said again.

  “I found her,” I said. “And I’ll give her to you, on one condition.”

  “What’s that, Mr. Blake?” Murco said.

  “I want her to suffer,” I said.

  Chapter 27

  “You surprise me,” he said.

  I kept walking, retracing the ambulance’s path, heading back toward Avenue D. “She attacked a friend of mine,” I said. “This friend may not survive.”

  “I see. And now my methods don’t seem so… inappropriate?” he said. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Tell me, Mr. Blake, does she still have my money?”

  “It’s not in her apartment, or if it is, she’s hidden it well. But I’m sure she knows where it is, and I’m sure you’ll be able to get it out of her.”

  “You make it sound so simple,” he said softly. “Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth.”

  Did he think he was being funny? I felt my stomach twist. I forced myself to remember Susan’s bloody body in my arms and Miranda lying on the roof at midnight, half her face blown away by a pair of hollow-point bullets.

  I gave him the address. “How soon can you get here?”

  “It takes me forty-five minutes to get into the city,” he said.

  “How about your son?”

  “He’ll meet me there.”

  “Well, I’m not waiting. I’m not taking a chance that she gets away while you’re driving in.”

  “It almost sounds like you want her worse than I do,” he said.

  “You can get back what she took from you,” I said. “I can’t.”